My exposure to them is obviously very biased, but every "streamer" or "influencer" who comes to my attention is just the dumbest fence-licker alive. Does streaming make you dumb?
@Betty i mean, i feel like “being spontaneously entertaining for many hours on end” requires the ability to turn off the bit of your brain that wants to consider things before you share them with the entire world at least so maybe less “makes you” than “required prerequisite” but
@Satsuma Yeah, I was thinking you're kind of turning yourself into a very simple stimulus-response organism that just does things to elicit excitement in the audience. Like, you're not really ... having conversations? With other humans?
IDK, this is probably a very simplistic view of the thing, I know there are smart streamers out there, I probably only come in contact with streamers when they do something so dumb it goes viral.
@Betty a number of highly skilled chess players do make part of their income from streaming so there are definitely niches that run counter to the trend but i think they mostly exist outside of the specific “influencer” streaming sphere (and as you say, much less likely to go viral and attract the notice of people outside their area)
@Satsuma lolol I mean, maybe the chess streamers are also not good at making conversation, but at least they are presumably chess-smart!
I will not be checking this out, tho, because I am not good enough at chess to have *any* appreciation for what they do.
@Betty yeah high level chess is firmly outside of my area of understanding as well so my knowledge is all secondhand but we can take comfort in the knowledge that there are streamers out there with intellect, if not common sense
@Satsuma I feel like a thing we are seeing with AI psychosis is how crucial community/human conversation is to human mental health, but also how much our economy that has been providing a sort of cut-rate "simulation" of community and has been impoverishing us.
@Betty the term parasocial relationship was wildly overused for a while there but even that fact itself does seem to point towards us as a society struggling with this a bit yeah
i dont think streaming is necessarily inherently worse than like, youtuber or fedi or whatever on a per dose basis. but the vibe i get is that current monetization systems require you to put in crazy hours? and like, doing that much of ANYTHING can’t be healthy
@Betty yeah i mean, a tv show doesnt really allow for much of a conversation either, but our financial model there isn’t “this is only profitable if the people producing this do nothing but produce content for 18 hours a day and the people consuming it spend all their free time watching”
@Satsuma and I do think it's meaningful that TV shows are made by real human beings talking to each other, and not one human locked in a closet for 400 hours.
Although what is a novel if not the product of one human locked in a closet for 400 hours? So maybe my hypothesis is not very sturdy
@Betty i am reminded of that one kurt vonnegut quote where his wife is like “if you bought an entire book of stamps you wouldnt have to waste a half hour going to the post office every time you wanted to mail a letter” and he’s like “ok but walking to the post office is the highlight of my entire day????”
@Satsuma Yeah. The human animal needs to talk to other human animals, go for little walks, and spend time alone. If the quality of one of these activities is degraded, it's not good.
@Satsuma I do think the infrastructure of streaming means you can't quite have a "conversation," you know? It's more like improv-ing with words thrown up by the audience.
But also, streaming does seem to have an objectively nuts structure.